


Day 24: Sickness - Swoon

by 221b_hound



Series: Techienician: Botanical Love [25]
Category: Dredd (2012), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: 30 Days of Techienician, M/M, Techienician
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-17 14:03:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8146831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: While Matt is with Techie for an eye checkup, another medical crisis is taking place:  Dopheld Mitaka has collpased. General Phasma carries him in her arms. Perhaps Captain Kit is not the only living creature to command her heart after all.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Between a nasty chest infection and a heavy workload the last few weeks, I've fallen behind! If I don't catch up by Friday I'll keep posting in October.

Techie’s okay going to the medbay for the weekly meds that keep his eyes just this side of okay, but Matt always goes with him when Techie’s getting his eyes physically checked every quarter. Techie hates people fussing about his eyes. He hates it so much he’s refusing to let the doctor try some new procedure that should end the constant battle between his mech-eyes and his body. Not if it means someone taking his eyes _out_ while he is _asleep_. _No kriffing way_.

Matt doesn’t want to argue with Techie, so he doesn’t, even though he would love for Techie not to have such sore eyes so much of the time.

Matt is in the medbay waiting room while Techie’s through the doors at the dispensary for a month’s supply of his eye meds when the main door swooshes open, as though it knows what’s coming.

In strides General Phasma, tall and fierce and not stopping for anyone, not even a pfassking pneumatic pfassking door, if it knows what’s pfassking good for it – because in her arms she carries Lieutenant Dopheld Mitaka.

“Medic!” she bellows as she storms into the medbay. In her arms, Mitaka is not only pale but waxy, sweating, his unconscious body wracked with tremors.

Medics come running from every room at the sound of her voice, and within moments two arrive with a gurney, on which the General lowers her Protocol Adviser. For all the momentum of her fury as she arrived, she lays him on the gurney gently, even tenderly.

“We were going over the details of the New Republic Ambassador’s visit when he collapsed,” Phasma tells the doctor briskly, “He had a fit of some kind.” She displays a leather glove that is dented with teeth marks. “I kept him from biting his tongue but that was all.”

“How long ago?” asks the doctor, gesturing for an assistant to make notes.

“Five minutes, the deck below. It was faster for me to bring him here than wait for a med crew to reach us.”

“What happened before the fit?”

Phasma shakes her head. “I… he seemed tired. He’s been working very hard of late, after the whole border business.”

“Slurring voice at all?”

Phasma frowns. “A little. And he seemed… flushed. He said the chamber was very warm. And then he…” She gestures helplessly towards the door, behind which her Protocol Adviser has been taken. “Fell.”

The doctor is calling up Mitaka’s medical history on his handheld screen and walks off, with barely a nod to the General, to look after the patient.

General Phasma stands in the middle of the medbay, staring at the closed door and looking uncharacteristically lost. She stands there for several heartbeats, as though willing her own to pass to the man on the other side. The man who kept her advised on protocol and possibilities through that whole terrifying ordeal with the border station. The man whose passing comment – “Who could benefit from a war? Except the weapons dealers, of course” – that suggested the truth to her.

General Phasma knows she is seen as the one who averted a cosmic war, but she also knows that Dopheld Mitaka is one of the main reasons she was able to do so.

“Um. General?”

General Phasma glances at the tall man beside her. Blond. Glasses. Awkward. Ah. Techie’s radar technician, Matt Hugon. She stares a second longer, unable to fathom what he wants with her, then looks down as he presses a cup into her hands.

“Kopi tea,” Matt explains.

General Phasma gazes into the cup of dark, orange-tinged tea as though she’s never seen it before in her life and can’t imagine how it came to be in her hands.

“It’s… um… warm,” says Matt.

Phasma sips it. It is warm. It’s sweet. It’s… soothing. With a huff of pent breath, Phasma sinks into a chair to wait. She takes another sip. She looks up at the radar technician hovering at her side. No-one else, she vaguely notices, has been brave enough to approach her. Everyone else has, instead, moved away. Made space. She wonders what kind of mood she’s been radiating to make them all do that. Being tall, being big, she tends to be intimidating without really trying. Ah well. Hugon would understand that.

“He’ll be okay,” says Matt. “They’re the best here. They take good care of Techie.”

Phasma looks at Matt. “He works so hard for me,” she says. “He’s always there. He’s always on point. He brings fish for my cat. He brought me sweetcakes after his leave last cycle.”

Matt nods, as though that all makes perfect sense.

“He fell at my feet,” Phasma says, because Matt is listening, “Like he’d been shot. He almost hit his head on the table. I caught him just in time.”

Matt nods, as though to say ‘of course you did’.

“He works so hard,” she repeats.

A flash of orange-red in her periphery vision, as Techie arrives. “He likes you,” says Techie diffidently.

His arm is pressed close to Matt’s. Phasma hasn’t properly noticed before how they’re nearly of a height, these two. Techie is more slender and looks more fragile, but of course he’s not. Nobody truly fragile would have survived all those years with a crime clan. Mitaka looks fragile sometimes, but he’s not. He’s shorter than Phasma, but there’s a dignified strength in him. Phasma is very fond of Mitaka. Very fond.

“I like him,” says Phasma, and wonders why she’s saying these things to these people. She glances across at the door again. Nothing. Nobody is coming out to explain. To let her know Mitaka is alive. Good news, yes? If nobody is telling her he is dead, then he is alive.

Techie moves uncomfortably beside Matt, who is looking at Phasma with concern as she stares at the door as though she can see beyond it with x-ray eyes if only she stares hard enough.

“General?” says Matt.

She looks at the two men again. Impatient. Lost. For the first time in her life in command, she doesn’t know how to wait.

“Lieutenant Mitaka brings Captain Kit to the Peace Garden at night, when you’re travelling,” says Techie from behind Matt’s elbow. “She likes to kill leaves. Mitaka runs all around the garden with a piece of string and she chases it. Once, she curled up in his hat and fell asleep, and he wouldn’t wake her up so he stayed there with her till she did and told me about how brilliant you were, making sure we didn’t go to war.”

Phasma stares now at Techie, not sure she’s ever heard that man speak so much at once. She replays what he’s just said and a tiny laugh explodes in a sharp rush from her lungs. “He let Kit sleep in his hat? He loves that hat.”

“So does Captain Kit,” says Techie with a shrug. Phasma finds another short laugh escaping, though it is edged with something other than humour.

That’s when the doctor comes out – a measured walk, not slow, not fast.  Just right. That is not the walk of a man with bad news.

General Phasma rises, pushes the mostly full cup of kopi tea back into Matt’s hands and marches forward to meet the doctor. She’s listening to a diagnosis of fatigue, dehydration, low blood sugar, a man pushing himself too hard in recent months who needs to slow down, but he’s well. Dopheld Mitaka will be well.

Matt and Techie hold hands watching their General as she listens to the doctor. She stands taller but also more relaxed. As the door to the hospital, where her Protocol Adviser is even now being treated with fluids and electrolytes, closes, she glances back at the two tall men and nods a short acknowledgement.

Then the door closes.

Matt squeezes Techie’s hand. “Does he really let the General’s cat sleep in his hat?”

“Yep.”

Matt considers this. Then he says, “Wanna watch a vid in bed? I think we’ve got the ingredients for sweetcakes on the shelf.”

And beside a hospital bed, General Phasma sits beside her Protocol Officer and holds his hand as he opens his eyes.

“Dopheld,” she says sternly, “Don’t scare me like that again.”

Mitaka feels her hand in his and dares to hope. “No General. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

The General leans close to his face and says, breathing softly. “I think when we’re off duty,” she says, “You can call me Phasma.”


End file.
